WWW- A FILING over on boingboing.net makes for some hilarious reading. They have linked to a forum post by the administrator of top burlesque porn-phenomenon SuicideGirls, where he posts a letter from Nintendo lawyers who have threatened the site with copyright infringement.

The chaps at Perkins Coie law firm are unhappy that a registered member of the SuicideGirls site, a chap by the name of Runelateralus, has listed in his ‘Interests’ bio that he likes Metroid, Zelda and F-Zero – all Nintendo games. Nintendo is unhappy that its intellectual property is being used in conjunction with a site that is sexually explicit. Poor old Runey, it appears, simply wanted other porn viewers to know his gaming habits.

A follow-up call to the firm by the springy chaps at boingboing unravelled the fact that no-one in the office at that time knew about the threatened action, and that, in a spectacular feat of irony, they couldn’t look at the site in question since porn was blocked by their own firewall.

To say that Nintendo doesn’t have a hope in hell of pulling this off, fnarr, would be an understatement. Americans benefit from very strong free speech laws, and since this is not a commercial use of the intellectual property by SuicideGirls, more an incidental mention, it will certainly fall within fair use guidelines – much as an academic is allowed to reference a copyrighted work for the purposes of criticism.

You can find the offensive bio on the SuicideGirls site at href=http://suicidegirls.com/members/RuneLateralus/ this place, but if you’ve got a job, make sure your boss isn’t watching because it’s not for the faint hearted, and if you go there, it’s at your own risk. [Surely wrist, Ed.] µ